"Teachers are the gardeners of humankind."

Month: October 2016

The Republican nominee for president, Donald J. Trump, proclaimed in late May 2016, “There’s one more thing we have to do to make America wealthy again. And you have to be wealthy to be great, I’m sorry to say it.” What good is wealth if social justice and progress is not the by-product?

For most of us, wealth is a wholly inadequate measure of this nation; wisdom, decency and compassion must surely be included as essential variables in any formula for greatness.

First, we are already among the wealthiest nations on the planet. However, we have allowed avarice to drive our economics and permitted the concentration of ostentatious wealth in the hands of too few. Vast intergenerational wealth has been amassed through the centuries-long exploitation of uncompensated and under-compensated labor.

The right to acquire wealth is not absolute. Your right to riches does not extend to harming your neighbors.

Too many of those preoccupied by the acquisition of wealth are more than willing to poison the water table, destabilize the climate, or even instigate wars to sell weaponry. Our history is replete with examples of enterprises whose products generated immense profits but ultimately proved harmful to the citizenry. Also, tales of ruthless and unscrupulous oligarchs adorn every decade. Overall, the obsessive pursuit of immense wealth has proven itself to be damaging to our social fabric.

Together, we must exhibit the wisdom to thwart the despoiling of the environment by industrialists. Collectively, we must have the decency to bequeath a habitable planet to our progeny. In the speech cited above, the Republican nominee proposed eliminating the energy tax and, and, later, the total elimination of governmental regulation of business. Such acts will herald a century of environmental catastrophes and societal upheaval.

Infinite riches will mean nothing to future generations if the soil will no longer support crops, the water table is poisoned, and the food chain is broken asunder.

Good for the corporate bottom line is not always good for people.

Unbridled capitalism leads to the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of too few citizens and threatens the abrogation of our social contract. One need look no further than the recent obscene price gouging on life-saving medications to see that always “charging what the market will bear” further marginalizes the disadvantaged among us.

In his essay “The Problem is Civil Obedience,” Howard Zinn wrote, “The wealth is distributed in this country and the world in such a way as not simply to require a small reform, but to require a drastic reallocation of wealth.” America is already an unimaginably wealthy nation, but its greatness is stymied when the hoarders of capital are permitted to invest heavily in the subversion of a government of, by and for the people.

Greatness will be at hand only if we avoid a descent into some Dickensian nightmare where the masses represent grist in the mills of corporate interest. Greatness will be at hand when more equitable shares of that national wealth are distributed among those who toil a lifetime in service to the common good, expecting little more than the potential of a better life for their children.

This Commentary first appeared in the Prince George’s Sentinel on June 08, 2016. It has been slightly expanded and revised.

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In his landmark work “Between the World and Me”, Ta-Nehisi Coates laments the hypocritical nature of the message he received in the Baltimore City Schools, “I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance.” When managing misbehavior replaces academic instruction, intellectual development is stifled.

Such circumstances are vexing for both students and professional educators. The narrator offers praise for some of his individual educators, but criticizes a “system” that focuses on punishment and places children in peril by returning them to the streets as a consequence for misbehavior in school. The argument is not without merit.

Fear of reprisal is a singularly poor motivator for any child. Policies of “zero-tolerance” have proven ineffective at modifying undesired behaviors in the school house.

Children, especially those children from harsh domestic environments, need more hours in instructional scenarios, not fewer. Those classrooms, however, also need to have the resources to do more than crowd children into sweat boxes for some portion of the day. Elevating young minds beyond their circumstance requires that educators possess the capacity to captivate.

We can no longer take pride in the occasional “against-all-odds” success story while failing to nurture the promise inherent in every child.

“The development of a factory-like system in the nineteenth-century schoolroom was not accidental,” Joel Spring said in “Education and the Rise of the Corporate State”. Educational triage was the primary goal: identify the most capable students, and then ensure that the rest arrive at the functional literacy required to follow instructions on the assembly line and sufficient numeracy to balance a checkbook.

Schooling, back then, had little to do with optimizing learning outcomes and more with learning to acquiesce to tedium and drudgery as preparation for the conditions likely to be encountered in the industrial workplace.

During the age of the robber barons, corporatists imported cheap labor from abroad to keep the cost of labor hopelessly low and profits high for the investor class. Now, they incorporate abroad, access labor at bargain-basement prices offshore, and avoid paying taxes in the United States while taking full advantage of our free market while returning little in the bargain. The public coffers suffer as a result.

Call the oligarchic elites of America what you will: capitalists, plutocrats, one-percenters, or political puppeteers! They consist mostly of obsessive hoarders-of-wealth. They utilize tiny portions of vast, inter-generational fortunes to persuade the political class that their power-and-privilege constitutes the natural order of things.

Is this society really intent on leaving no child behind? Then, why do we still employ an educational model that assumed a large portion of the school age population would never obtain a diploma? In his landmark work “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” Paolo Freire explained it quite succinctly. “It would be indeed naïve to expect the oppressor elites to carry out a liberating education.” That duty, therefore, falls to the rest of us.

[This commentary appeared originally in the Prince George’s Sentinel on August 19, 2015. It has been slightly re-worked.]